The Federal Reserve is expecting economic growth to SLOW DOWN. They are expecting real GDP growth of 2.7% this year, and that's with the massive fiscal stimulus we are applying. They expect that growth will SLOW to 2.4% next year, in 2019, and then slow even further, to 2.0%, in 2020. And then, after that, they expect that economic growth will be LESS than 2% in the years after 2020, because the U.S. labor force will be growing at a glacially slow pace. The only thing that would change that is some kind of blue sky productivity revolution. Do you have something in your back pocket that's bigger than electricity? Well, alrighty, then!

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have issued similar forecasts of DECLINING growth rates for the American economy. So has Fannie Mae. So has every respectable and credible economic forecaster that I know of.

I still have the same health-care insurance I had back in 2008, but we're never going to see 4% economic growth, nor lower insurance premiums, nor an infrastructure investment, nor Mexico paying us to build a border wall.

The only thing we can really count on is the fact that the Trump tax cuts are going to balloon our federal deficit. Then again, deficits don't matter -- so long as Republicans have control of the federal government.

I'm just glad to see Obama voters suddenly discovering that GDP growth is important.

Trump is the one that made all the great claims, not Obama, even though your ODS is still biting you . Big LeRoy has it right, do not expect massive percentage increases in GDP because they are not going to happen, not for Obama, and damn sure not for Trump and his fucking trickle down..

Trump is the one that made all the great claims, not Obama, even though your ODS is still biting you . Big LeRoy has it right, do not expect massive percentage increases in GDP because they are not going to happen, not for Obama, and damn sure not for Trump and his fucking trickle down..

Lol, "it's ok because we downplayed it."
I don't expect much because Obama left a shitty economy behind.

This is the best explanation i've ever found explaining why GDP didn't grow much under Obama and won't under anyone until some structural changes are made. Tax cuts and deregulation actually discourage GDP growth.

The most depressing theory about what’s going on is that the pace of American innovation has slowed for good, and growth will, too. This is explanation comes from Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern, whose book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, is a hot topic of discussion in economic circles. Gordon argues that the period of growth between 1750 and 2004 was a unique episode in human history, during which time humans invented things that dramatically improved both productivity and living standards, including the internal combustion engine, airplanes, highways, and the internet. Many of these inventions can happen only once in human history, and now that they have occurred, there’s little room to add more time-saving inventions. Many recent innovations, such as apps like Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, are extremely popular among users, but aren’t exactly creating large leaps in productivity. “Innovation is occurring only around the fringes of the economy, not at the core areas that account for the most output and most employment,” Gordon told me in a phone call last week.

There’s another reason that there may not be much innovation in the U.S. economy: People aren’t creating new firms and businesses to challenge existing ones. In fact, the pace of new firms entering the market is at a worrisome low. Small, new start-ups tend to produce more innovation than big, established firms, Robert Litan, a former fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies entrepreneurship, told me. “An economy that’s more dominated by big firms is less likely to produce disruptive innovations,” he said. Small, new firms also hire more people on the margins of the economy, bringing people into the workforce who might otherwise have sat on the sidelines, Dane Stengler, a vice president of Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, said. It’s possible that the rise of monopolies has made it harder for start-ups or smaller firms to compete, Litan said. When there’s a concentration of big firms located in a city, workers tend to stick with large, established firms, rather than striking out on their own.

Another slow-growth theory argues that U.S. companies are sitting on billions of dollars of cash that could be put to better use. Rather than spending on research and development—which could in turn lead to innovations that make employees more productive—companies are just holding onto their money. Some economists think this is a result of what’s called “quarterly capitalism,” which puts pressure on companies to make bigger and bigger profits each quarter, or risk pushback from shareholders. Quarterly capitalism, also known as short-termism, can mean that companies don’t want to spend cash to innovate, preferring instead to pad their bottom line or to return profits directly to shareholders. “This is the trend in corporate governance, towards a lower level of investment,” Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of a paper on short-termism, told me. After all, interest rates are low right now, which would usually motivate corporations to borrow money and invest. The fact that they’re not “means something fishy is going on,” he said.